![]() ![]() ![]() “There was always this longing to nurture the local art scene and introduce interesting ideas from abroad,” says Ingólfur Arnarsson, another founding member of Nýló, who will receive a solo exhibition at the Reykjavík Art Museum in November. After SÚM was dissolved in the late 70s, a lot of the works were donated to the then-forming Living Art Museum, which took it upon itself to preserve and build upon the legacy. The conceptual swiss artist Dieter Roth, who had relocated to Iceland with his wife, designed the catalogue for their first exhibition in 1965 and mailed it to his artist friends around the world, suddenly bringing the isolated group into a broader context. Soon, they started to operate collectively under the name SÚM. Up until the 1960s, with no formal art education system, the scene was dominated by the state-run National Gallery, which focused its efforts on documenting the country’s recent history and international trends in abstract expressionism, particularly with European ties.īut in the mid-60s, a disjointed group of internationally educated Icelandic artists started to bring the ideas of avant garde movements such as Fluxus back from their sojourns abroad. The Nordic island, which today has a population of 350,000 (roughly the same as the London borough of Newham), has not always been the culturally sophisticated, nature-loving tourist destination we know today. Photograph: Nýló, the Living Art Museum Their initial intention was rather pragmatic: to collect and preserve the works of their peers, particularly in the fields of performance and art publishing, so that they wouldn’t get lost or destroyed. The Living Art Museum, locally known as Nýló (short for new art in Icelandic), was born in 1978 under the impulse of a group of radical artists who had grown frustrated with the National Gallery of Iceland’s lack of interest in their work. They are here for Pressure of the Deep, the non-profit’s 40th anniversary exhibition, which gathers works by 30 artists from the 1960s to the present day. “Maybe someone will recognise it tonight,” speculates the hopeful museum director and artist Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir, as an eccentric flock of locals starts to arrive. The piece, likely dated from the 1970s, comes from the museum’s collection, although no one seems to know what it is, or who made it. I n a corner of Reykjavík’s Living Art Museum, a small stone tied in a net hangs precariously from the ceiling. ![]()
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